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Cambodia genocide court co-prosecutor resigns

By Bernard Hibbitts (editor) and University of Pittsburgh School of Law students.

[JURIST] A co-prosecutor at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) announced on Tuesday that he was stepping down in September for personal and family reasons. Canadian Robert Petit, charged with trying those responsible for atrocities committed during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, called his work at the court the "greatest privilege of career." Petit became International Co-Prosecutor at ECCC in 2006, after working as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the UN Mission of Assistance in East Timor, and in the War Crimes Section of the Canadian Department of Justice. Petit said that his departure would not affect that work of the court, and that he was confident that the UN would name a successor soon. The Cambodian national co-prosecutor Chea Leang will continue on in her role. The ECCC is in the midst of the first trial of a former Khmer Rouge leader, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as "Duch." Last week, the court found that Kaing has been detained unlawfully by a Cambodian military court for the past 10 years, but denied a defense request for his release. In late April, Kaing admitted to training prison staff to use torture to obtain confessions from prisoners, after he accepted responsibility for the deaths of 12,000 Cambodians in the S-21 prison camp. Kaing's trial is the first of eight that the ECCC hopes to hear against former members of the Khmer Rouge, which has been accused of murdering 1.7 million Cambodians during its nearly four-year reign. The ECCC has long been plagued with accusations of corruption and inadequate funding, with greater problems in recent years. Last month, Japan agreed to donate $4 million to the tribunal after the ECCC reported in March that it would be unable to pay its Cambodian employees for that month, one year after the court had requested $114 million dollars from the UN. In February, Human Rights Watch warned that the ECCC trials were in danger of being tainted for their failure to follow fair trial standards, and in January a Cambodian court agreed to hear a corruption case involving two ECCC judges.

Full post as published by JURIST - The Paper Chase on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).